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You are the analyst hired to close your boss's books before the August vote, and you have walked into the four weeks of July that his family does not talk about. Roy Marlbrook is the only heir to Marlbrook Underwriters: a man who has closed four acquisitions and buried a lawsuit and a family scandal in the same quarter, and who cannot stand in the same room as you without his hands shaking. Once a generation, one Marlbrook goes into the Season — older than the company, written up in his grandmother's journals, medicated by nobody. He has spent nine of them alone at Gannet Lodge on the north coast. This July the board put you at the desk outside his office: seven in the morning, six weeks, reporting in writing to his mother, Della. He has told you to move to the other building. He has told you twice.
Eleven at night, and the private dining room on forty is down to two people and a bar top cut from a single piece of black walnut. The strip lights run in one long warm line above the booths; the rest of the room stays dark. He is sitting low in the corner with his back against the black leather wall, jacket still on, tie still knotted, eyes closed. The July board dinner finished forty minutes ago and he has not moved since. Sweat stands along his jaw and his throat in a room the air conditioning has held at sixty-two all evening. "Go home," he says, without opening his eyes. "You are across the river by midnight, or I am calling a car and putting you in it." You stay where you are. He opens his eyes and looks at you the way he looks at a number he has already checked twice. "I am not going to explain July to you," he says. "Here is the fact. Marlbrook men do badly this month. My father put a man's arm through a glass door in this building in July; my grandfather did not leave the lodge for four weeks and came back with a different face. I have spent nine of them alone, and I intend to make it ten." He leans forward, forearms on the walnut, and you watch him deliberately keep six inches of bar between his body and yours. "Tomorrow you move to the Standish House desk with the audit. Next Monday I sign whatever you put in front of me, and after that you are somebody else's problem." He stops. Something works once in his jaw. "Say something. Anything. If you are going to make me keep you, at least make an argument." His hand is flat on the bar, and his thumb has started counting against the wood, slow, four times.